“I just came out loving to take things apart, put things together, organize my room,” she told Fortune. “I was really, really focused from the time I was very young with this insatiable appetite to learn about design, to improve design, and then just really never looked back.”

Now Wiggins Johnson owns her design firm, Cosee Home, which she founded at 24, and designs multimillion-dollar homes across Texas and beyond. 

Shortly after graduating magna cum laude from Texas A&M’s College of Architecture and starting her career near Houston, she moved to West Texas to start her own firm. The local market didn’t have much of a hiring pool, but it had a need she was built for: high-end clients who wanted one person to oversee an entire project rather than hand it between an architect, an interior designer, a project manager, and a landscape designer. 

Her firm does it all.

One point of contact for multimillion-dollar homes

That “fully integrated” approach is extremely rare in the home design world and has largely driven Cosee Home’s success. Wiggins Johnson steers architecture, interiors, furnishings, and landscaping as a single vision for her ultrawealthy clients building multimillion-dollar homes. 

Within months of opening, she had a wait list stretching close to a year, and it has since grown to roughly 18 months. The demand for her work intensified during the pandemic. While many people picked up hobbies like quilting or sewing, her business got busier as they stayed home and studied their spaces. She went from very busy to what she called “unsustainable,” which pushed her to build a small, specialized team to keep up with demand. And that demand hasn’t slowed down since. 

Her projects under the Cosee Home brand aren’t priced by square footage. A 3,000-square-foot house can run $5 million on finishes alone, but a 15,000-square-foot home could reach $11 million or $12 million. At any given time, her small team is managing between 50,000 and 125,000 square feet of active design across a 12-month stretch. Most of her clients are based in Texas, but she also has projects as far as Montana and Florida, which are largely driven by past client relationships. 

She’s building in a market that favors high-touch work. The U.S. interior design industry is worth about $26.5 billion, according to IBISWorld, and the South commands the largest regional share. Luxury residential construction in Texas and Florida largely fuels it. Meanwhile, renovation and full-service turnkey projects are among the fastest-growing segments of the global interior design market, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence. 

The app that led to her business success

Wiggins Johnson credits some of her success to the app she spent nine years building. Designing a home, she said, is “a chaos of information,” because every decision stacks on the last, and can be scattered across texts, DMs, and papers. She used to print multiple copies and update everything on-site by hand. 

“A simple process not only gives you back emotional capital you would have otherwise lost—it actually builds trust,” she said. “The more simple it is, the more straightforward, everyone’s happier for it.”

So her app, Cosee Studio, which was built for designers, lets clients, builders, and contractors see every photo, selection, and installation note in one place. 

“Without it, we’re basically back to like a carriage with horses taking us along,” she said. “What Cosee Studio has done for us is it’s really given us like a high-end sports car that’s getting us places very fast. 

The app is now free to download, with paid tiers starting at $15 per month. An AI-powered feature allows designers to compose room views while keeping a client’s private space out of frame. About 2,500 users have signed up for the app. While it’s mostly designers using the app, others have gotten creative, using it to plan weddings and recipes. She said some people even used it after the California wildfires to run home-inventory records for insurance claims. 

Wiggins Johnson is also an author whose home-building workbook became an Amazon No. 1 New Release, and she said her advice to founders is to avoid expecting overnight success when starting a business. 

“Realistic expectations really set you up for success,” she said. “If you know going into it it’s going to be hard—it’s going to take longer than you think—when those things happen, you aren’t surprised, and you keep pushing forward.”